Paramedic Shares His Wild Ride Treating ‘A Thousand Naked Strangers’
Former paramedic Kevin Hazzard on treating “speedball” overdoses, in which the patient has mixed heroin and cocaine:
“The one that can be the trickiest is the person who has overdosed. So you arrive, and they have all the signs of a heroin overdose, and so you have Narcan which immediately reverses some of the effects, basically the central nervous system effects of the heroin, so the heroin when there’s too much of it, it essentially tells your brain, “Hey, there’s no reason to breathe, just relax, you’re good.” And that’s how people die. So you show up, there’s a guy with needles, brown powdery substance, he’s blue, and you think, “Oh, heroin overdose, this is no big deal, I’ve done this 10,000 times.” And you give him some Narcan thinking, “Hey, I’m just going to make him breathe.” Now the heroin’s gone and all that cocaine is still there, and he pops up and he’s like, “Hey! What did you do to my heroin?” And now you’ve got this very large, very angry, very confused person running around with a head full of coke and you’re usually in the backseat of a car or a crammed into a tiny little bathroom, or a bathroom stall in a restaurant and all of a sudden this person pops up and invariably they’re bigger than you and stronger than you and they’re half-naked and sweaty, so you can’t a grip anyway. Those get ugly in a hurry.”
Hazzard’s new memoir is called A Thousand Naked Strangers
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